Private tours in Madrid

Madrid rewards people who know where to look. The Prado holds so much that an unguided visit usually ends in fatigue rather than pleasure, the Habsburg old town hides its best squares one street off the obvious route, and the city's two great day trips — Toledo and Segovia — sit barely half an hour away. Tour Travel & More organises 100% private tours of Madrid with a licensed official tour guide, a luxury vehicle with chauffeur and a travel coordinator available 24/7.

The Royal Palace and Habsburg Madrid

The Palacio Real has 3,418 rooms, more than any other functioning royal palace in Europe, and it was built on the site of the old Alcázar that burned down on Christmas Eve 1734. Around it lies the Madrid de los Austrias: the Plaza Mayor, the covered passages, the convent doorways and the taverns that have been pouring since the nineteenth century. Your guide handles the entry times and the order that keeps the day walking, not queuing.

The Prado, decoded

Nobody sees the Prado in one visit, and trying is the most common mistake visitors make here. A private guide picks a route through the rooms that matter to you — Velázquez and Las Meninas, Goya's black paintings, Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights — and tells you what to look at and why it was painted. Two focused hours beat four exhausting ones, and the Paseo del Arte has two more world-class museums when you want them.

Toledo and Segovia, door to door

Toledo is thirty minutes south: a walled city on a granite outcrop where Christian, Jewish and Muslim Spain shared the same streets for centuries, with a cathedral that took 267 years to finish. Segovia is an hour north, with a Roman aqueduct standing without a drop of mortar and an Alcázar that inspired the fairy-tale castle. With a private vehicle and chauffeur, either fits comfortably into a single day.

Markets, tabernas and the Madrid that eats late

Madrid has no coast and cooks the best seafood in Spain — the old joke is that it is the country's largest fishing port, because everything arrives overnight. Your guide takes you to the taverns behind the tourist streets: vermut before lunch, a bocadillo de calamares near the Plaza Mayor, a cocido on a winter afternoon. The city eats late and long, and that is a feature, not a problem.

With Tour Travel & More, Madrid becomes a capital you actually get to know rather than tick off. Send us your dates and what interests you, and a travel expert will build your private tour around your pace, with an official guide and everything arranged in advance.